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Place de la Concorde the ‘ Guillotine was erected, Jan. 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI. The scaffold was raised a few yards to the w. of the pedestal. The king commenced an address to the people, but was not allowed to finish it; on a signal from Santerre, who commanded the soldiers, the king was seized from behind, bound to the bascule, or setting-plank, and thrust under the axe. No sooner had the head fallen than the crowd rushed in to dip hands, pikes, or handkerchiefs in the blood.’
    And then on 16 October Marie-Antoinette, ‘the once beautiful queen, the most maligned of her sex, but innocent of all moral guilt; she preserved her calm dignity to the last … The blood thus shed like water remained in pools around the spot for the dogs to lick up, and on one occasion the oxen employed to drag a classic car in one of the theatrical processions of the Convention stood still in horror at the tainted spot.’
    Baedeker reminds us that from 1793 to 1795 ‘upwards of 2800 persons perished here by the guillotine’. He also recounts that the last stand of the Communards, in 1871, took place – conveniently – in the Père Lachaise cemetery, where several hundred insurgents took up their position and ‘planted cannon near the tomb of the Due de Morny and the conspicuous Beaujour monument, using the latter as their guard-house. A few days later the batteries of Montmaitre opened their fire upon the cemetery, destroying seven or eight monuments and injuring others. On the 27th the defenders of the cemetery, as well as those insurgents who on being driven back from the barricades of the Château d’Eau and the Place de la Bastille had sought refuge here, were compelled to abandon it, many however, being captured and shot. Near the wall of Charonne, which bears numerous marks of bullets, 147 National Guards, who had been taken prisoner at the barricades, were shot a few days later.’
    From the cemetery it is not far distant to the famous morgue which, Murray tells us, ‘is a place where bodies of the murdered, drowned, or of suicides, are exposed until they are recognised. On entering, a glazed partition will be seen, behind which are exposed the bodies of men and women found dead or drowned, and unowned. They are stretched naked, with the exception of a piece of leather over the loins, upon black marble slabs; the clothes found hang on pegs above them, and a stream of water is trickling over the bodies. Each corpse is exposed for 3 days, and there are usually 3 or 4 at a time, often hideously bloated and distorted, the majority being taken from the river. About 200 are carried to the Morgue every year on average, of whom about one-sixth are women and one-sixth new-born infants. The greatest number are found in June and July, the fewest in December and January. Gambling at the Bourse is the most fruitful cause of suicide. 15 fr. is paid for every corpse brought in. The larger proportion are never claimed by their friends, and are buried at the public expense. A perpetual stream of men, women, and children pour in and out of this horrible exhibition, to gaze at the hideous objects before them, usually with great indifference.’ Baedeker adds: ‘The painful scene attracts many spectators daily, chiefly persons of the lower orders.’
    Baedeker also devotes a section to the Catacombs, which used to be quarries, and date from Roman times, extending under a great part of Paris, with sixty entrances in different suburbs. Several streets in the southern part of the city, situated above these quarries, having begun to show symptoms of sinking, ‘steps were taken by the government in 1784 to avert the danger by constructing piers and buttresses where the upper surface was insufficiently supported. About the same time the Council of State ordered the removal of the bodies from the Cemetery of the Innocents, and others, which were closed at the period, to these